Digital marketing refers to online marketing, or the activities you do on the internet to promote your business. This includes paid advertising, the use of social media, content marketing, affiliate marketing, inbound marketing, sponsored content, SEO and email marketing. The major aim of digital marketing is to raise your brand awareness and meet your specific business goals, be it website traffic, increased sales or the attraction of new leads.
One of the greatest things about digital marketing is that as it is online everything can be tracked with a few tools, which means you can analyse how successful your efforts are and adjust accordingly. Let me share a few more benefits with you.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
As mentioned above, there are plenty of analytic tools and ways you can assess how successful your digital marketing efforts are. This makes monitoring the ROI (return on investment) easier for specific campaigns as well as your overall efforts. Additional benefits of using digital marketing include:
- Improved conversion rates and higher ROI as you are specifically focusing on your target audience which are more likely to follow your call to action.
- Get real-time results so you can see instantly how your campaigns are progressing.
- Reach a wider audience than you would advertising in a print-based magazine or locally.
- Ability to reach people at the start of their buying journey and influence the direction they take.
- Easy to make changes as you go, unlike traditional print or radio marketing.
- Increased customer loyalty as you are able to keep in contact via a range of online methods.
Having a website is a key business tool and if you haven’t already got one, this should be first on your to-do list. Let’s take a look at what else you should be doing.
Your Digital Marketing First Steps
Once you have your website up and running, your next steps are to:
- define your goals to help you craft your digital strategy plan
- be clear on your specific target audience, so you know who you are marketing to
- decide on a budget for your chosen digital channels, be it social media, SEO (search engine optimisation ie. getting found on Google), or content marketing
- evaluate any existing digital channels – are they current, do they need to be updated or reinvigorated
- create a comprehensive social media strategy, and we can help you with this!
- automate your marketing efforts where possible, this could include outsourcing your social media management to give you time to focus on other tasks
- check your progress using your chosen analytical tools
We understand that it can be daunting starting with digital marketing, but we’d love to make this an easy, enjoyable and beneficial time for you and your business. Get in touch today and let’s have a chat about how the team at Spigot Digital can help you and your business have greater success online.